OK, so here's your business model: Make a tiny distribution, just the stuff that the average user needs. Make a lot of choices for them.
Make sure it installs and runs smoothly, and that the applications are interacting well.
Then, hype it up and sell it as Linux made simple, and get a good staff of support people. I think it would make a great business.
And, as it happens, I think it would be good for Linux too.
Teachers are getting some flames here, but cool teachers exist, you know!
There were two computer science teachers on my school, and the other teacher was responsible for installing anti-virus software. But he didn't do his work very well, so my teacher asked me and a friend if we could write something to get him moving. This was in the DOS days, I didn't come to learn UNIX before I went to university.
We wrote a small program that would increase the time between each time a keystroke would be registered. After a thousand keystrokes, the delay would be 50 ms, or something, and then go linearly with number of actual keystrokes. It was really fun watching people working with those computers....:-)
Well, the next day, the fun was over. New virus-scanners were installed, and we removed the program. The other teacher never understood what had happened, ours thanked us.
Another time, our teacher managed to delete C:\
("are you sure (Y/N)?" "Bloody hell, yes, of course, I'm sure", "whooooops"), and he was very happy tons of "unauthorized" software were installed on the computers to bring it back, because he didn't have any undelete utility himself.
Well, I'm really the kind of astronomer who thinks that what can be visited by space probes is boring, but...
Anyway, Pluto is probably a Kuiper belt object, and it's a lot of research going on about Kuiper belt objects, so I guess going to Pluto is worthwhile. And fun.
It is an unfortunate state of affairs, but no one can claim to know that a paticular
project is patent-free.
If I've got this right, you can if you use stuff published in research papers that wasn't patented at the time the paper was written.
And, that's what the Xiph-folks do, isn't it?
Further, since it is the responsibility of referees to know if something is new or not, when something is published in a refereed journal, and doesn't contain a reference to a patent, then you can be fairly confident there are no patents to be afraid of.
But I could have gotten this all wrong, of course.
They've merely restricted the mechanism that you use to say it.
It is a very interesting problem this. To what extent is it good to restrict the mechanisms people have available to say what they want?
You can't let everyone on national TV, but given that you have the know-how, I feel it is an important right to be able to construct a TV camera and transmit broadcasts to your neighbour. You don't have the right to be heard, but you do have the right to say it.
Of course, there are practical issues that put restrictions on who can say what where. Such as bandwidth and airtime constraints. For radio, I guess bands are a scarce resource, and it must be managed in some way. Giving it all to media mega-corps is certainly not a Good Thing [tm], of course.
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to
hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas
through any media and regardless of frontiers.
(My emphasis). Through any media. What does that mean? Shouldn't it mean that any mechanisms should be available?
Great stuff. Now, there are a few million people who are trapped inside AOL's portal, watch CNN and read Time magazine, and thinking they're informed...
The first thing I ask when I'm researching ISPs is "You do have a good policy on spam, do you? You will make a black hole out of a spammer within 24 hours of the spam, will you?" If they can't say yes and stand by it, I wouldn't have anything to do with them. Media3 is the worst spamhaus around, and people should just go somewhere else. I have hurt so badly by spam I have no sympathy for those you pay money to a spamhaus.
The RBL has quite a history of questionable listings and mistakes...
Yes, and they've learned a lot from it.
I've have written two RBL nominations, both times, it was a spammer who had been spamming me heavily for almost a year. Neither of those went through. Nowadays, RBL is extremely conservative in what they list. It's really, really bad before it's a listing on RBL. And the poinbt that Jamie's missing is that that's the reason why RBL is ineffective in the short term in stopping spam. They are extremely conservative. They don't use the whack-a-mole tactic of blocking only where the spam comes from. To use that tactic, you'll have to respond within a few minutes, don't do any research beyond the reports, and certainly commit more mistakes. It would have been useful to have service that did that in addition to RBL, but that would have been really demonic. Those who say that MAPS should only block where the spam is coming from simply needs to get a clue.
They're not innocent. They're putting food on the table for a spamhaus. They should move, it's as simple as that. Web pages can be hosted anywhere on the globe.
It's hard to move millions of people, it's easy to change ISP. Very easy, there are tons of them out there. Could be done within a minute. Media3 is a spamhaus, it's one of the worst spamhäuse out there, and if I was peacefire, I'd think twice before giving my money to a spamhaus. Sorry, no sympathy here, peacefire should move, or get media3 to drop the spammers.
Perhaps I've missed something here.... Ogg Vorbis isn't GPLed is it? It's public domain? The software developed by the Ogg Vorbis project is LGPLed, so if you want to use the libraries, it's relevant, but the format itself if public domain, you can use it anyway you like.
Yeah, I think 1:250 is a really huge risk, and I have a _very_ hard time understanding this could be correct. Yahoo gives very little details on how it was derived. Perhaps they forgot a few zeros? 1:250000 would be more like it.
If, indeed the chance is 1:250, then I think the DoD spending is justified.
You don't have to design pages specifically for any browser. You design a page that is accessible, and it works anywhere. It's the whole point of the web.
Opera is not spyware, and it'll never be. I know a few people there, and about all the techies there are members of Electronic Frontier Norway. Nobody would dream of adding spyware. You could take my word for it, or you could write some stuff to see what kind of information Opera sends out. They are very concerned about privacy.
If you don't want the ads, pay for it, and they'll go away.
AOL. I know a few people at Opera too, and nobody there would put in anything like spyware. About all the techies there are members of Electronic Frontier Norway, and some are pretty active too.
I once did a back-of-an-envelope calculation, and got to about 100 deaths myself as a worst case scenario, using the standard linear model. It's well known and you can find it in any biophysics text book. These calculations are very easy.
However, there is mounting evidence that the standard linear model is wrong, that small doses of radition isn't dangerous, and I would be surprised, very surprised if a reentry where the RTGs dissolved, which is the worst-case scenario, pretty much, caused any deaths at all.
Finally, you might want to read Carl Sagan's article about the launch of Galileo. It was the same issue back then, and as good as every point he made back then is valid for Cassini, and indeed similar future projects.
Damn, I've been anti-nukes since long before it became politically correct to be it.
It's a very unfortunate fact that now that everybody is anti-nukes, you can say anything and get away with it. I hate that, it undermines the efforts of knowledgeable anti-nuke and anti-war advocates. Cassini was never an issue, none of the three concerns you list were valid, as is very apparent if you sit down and do the math yourself.
As for hardware and protocols, I guess it could be interesting as a amateur science project, and NASA are usually quite open about such things. The link posted by lemox, has the e-mail address of the project manager at the bottom of it. Why don't you contact him and ask about the feasibility of building something to downlink data and analyze them. You know, I think most old scientists would provide that inforamtion very cheerfully.
My additional question is what practical use it's information would have today,
with all the monitoring equipment we have on Earth and have sent into orbit.
Very little, I'm afraid. There are many more very good instruments, most notably SOHO, TRACE.
However, for a amateur science project, it would be great, as you're working on data from a spacecraft that made history, and you're the only one who does it.
The question remains, how expensive it would be to build an antenna to downlink the signals.
Yeah, I always thought it was funny, you know, all the great men, when you see them in paintings or on monuments or whatever, they are all so old.
It kind of makes you wonder how they looked, and how they thought when they were, say, 30 years old. I can imagine, if a person writes an autobiography when he's 80, he is going to have a different angle on his life when he was 20 than he does when he writes it at 30.
Even better, write the stuff down before you do the revolution. That's going to be something for the historians of the future. (Hm, I've copied everything I've got to tape the last couple of years, now it's time to do something revolutionary....:-) )
Hm, no. For one thing, a document could, and often should, exist in many different content types, and servers should use content negotation to serve them.
More importantly, you impose a hierarchal structure on the web, but the web was invented to solve the many problems hierarchal systems represent.
Now, the DNS does represent a problem for the web, TimBL discuss this in his book, but you're going in the wrong direction, IMHO.
After reading the original articles, they claim a 3 arcminute alignment accuracy, and this claim is backed by scholars who I respect very much and who are not likely to exaggerate the accuracy of such things, I guess I will have to read the references given. I must say I have a really hard time understanding how they could measure the alignment to more than about half a degree or so, but perhaps somebody has thought of something smart I haven't considered. Oh well.
While I agree with your point that the WWW is in a terrible state, that's mostly due to a bunch of overpaid graphics designers, and due to a browser war that emphasized graphical designs. It is not the fault of the web. The web can be all gopher is, and more. Much more.
I remember using gopher more than WWW in the beginning of 1994. But I never really liked it. It's too hierarchal. Also, it's not necessarily free as in speech or beer, as the originators said that they might charge for it in the future. Perhaps they have changed their mind, and it was good they were honest about it, but I think that is an important reason why it couldn't take off.
IANAG, but I think this won't work. The most important thing is that viruses mutate and change so fast it'll probably strike back. Another concern is that humans are so alike genetically, it'll be very difficult to find something that hits only an ethnic group. That being said, selling a national genome seems like a Bad Idea [tm]. What they are hoping to get out of it, is probably more medical attention, but they are going to get quite a lot unwanted attention too, I suspect...
...this has been said long ago. In Sweden, government is pouring money into it, actually building (at least planning) a high-speed network in the country. Norway is just hoping that the marketplace will do it. I don't think they will come up with satisfactory solutions, and apparently the big firms building infrastructure will also lock people in, force them to use their portals, watch their banner ads, and so on. I would personally prefer Sweden's model, where it is more likely that small companies can compete with the large one, securing freedom of choice.
I can't really sympathise. If you started editing there, why didn't you clean it up
yourself?
Oh, I did. The category had high quality for a period, and the cooperation between the three listed editors were good. But, when you spend most of your time educating editalls, who in spite of getting an lengthy e-mail with explanations and references to contemporary research continue to add sites that suck either after ignoring the e-mail or responding "who cares if the site suck, every submitted site has got a right to be in dmoz", or something to that effect, well it's time to take a hint and retire.
Care to elaborate? I'm not very knowledgeable in the history of science, but it
looks okay to me.
See? Exactly my point! I bet it looked okay to the editalls who did this too, but they weren't wise enough to stay away....:-) Well, since you have been wise enough to stay away, you're not really the subject of my flames. When you grant someone power who has little knowledge to tie up those who have, there is not going to be peer review. Well, the answer to your question is no, I have elaborated this to death in the foras, and if you'd care to improve dmoz, you could search for my user id there.
Slashdot Mirror
Then, hype it up and sell it as Linux made simple, and get a good staff of support people. I think it would make a great business.
And, as it happens, I think it would be good for Linux too.
There were two computer science teachers on my school, and the other teacher was responsible for installing anti-virus software. But he didn't do his work very well, so my teacher asked me and a friend if we could write something to get him moving. This was in the DOS days, I didn't come to learn UNIX before I went to university.
We wrote a small program that would increase the time between each time a keystroke would be registered. After a thousand keystrokes, the delay would be 50 ms, or something, and then go linearly with number of actual keystrokes. It was really fun watching people working with those computers.... :-)
Well, the next day, the fun was over. New virus-scanners were installed, and we removed the program. The other teacher never understood what had happened, ours thanked us.
Another time, our teacher managed to delete C:\ ("are you sure (Y/N)?" "Bloody hell, yes, of course, I'm sure", "whooooops"), and he was very happy tons of "unauthorized" software were installed on the computers to bring it back, because he didn't have any undelete utility himself.
Anyway, Pluto is probably a Kuiper belt object, and it's a lot of research going on about Kuiper belt objects, so I guess going to Pluto is worthwhile. And fun.
If I've got this right, you can if you use stuff published in research papers that wasn't patented at the time the paper was written.
And, that's what the Xiph-folks do, isn't it?
Further, since it is the responsibility of referees to know if something is new or not, when something is published in a refereed journal, and doesn't contain a reference to a patent, then you can be fairly confident there are no patents to be afraid of.
But I could have gotten this all wrong, of course.
It is a very interesting problem this. To what extent is it good to restrict the mechanisms people have available to say what they want?
You can't let everyone on national TV, but given that you have the know-how, I feel it is an important right to be able to construct a TV camera and transmit broadcasts to your neighbour. You don't have the right to be heard, but you do have the right to say it.
Of course, there are practical issues that put restrictions on who can say what where. Such as bandwidth and airtime constraints. For radio, I guess bands are a scarce resource, and it must be managed in some way. Giving it all to media mega-corps is certainly not a Good Thing [tm], of course.
Next, read Article 19 of Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
(My emphasis). Through any media. What does that mean? Shouldn't it mean that any mechanisms should be available?
Great stuff. Now, there are a few million people who are trapped inside AOL's portal, watch CNN and read Time magazine, and thinking they're informed...
The first thing I ask when I'm researching ISPs is "You do have a good policy on spam, do you? You will make a black hole out of a spammer within 24 hours of the spam, will you?" If they can't say yes and stand by it, I wouldn't have anything to do with them. Media3 is the worst spamhaus around, and people should just go somewhere else. I have hurt so badly by spam I have no sympathy for those you pay money to a spamhaus.
Yes, and they've learned a lot from it.
I've have written two RBL nominations, both times, it was a spammer who had been spamming me heavily for almost a year. Neither of those went through. Nowadays, RBL is extremely conservative in what they list. It's really, really bad before it's a listing on RBL. And the poinbt that Jamie's missing is that that's the reason why RBL is ineffective in the short term in stopping spam. They are extremely conservative. They don't use the whack-a-mole tactic of blocking only where the spam comes from. To use that tactic, you'll have to respond within a few minutes, don't do any research beyond the reports, and certainly commit more mistakes. It would have been useful to have service that did that in addition to RBL, but that would have been really demonic. Those who say that MAPS should only block where the spam is coming from simply needs to get a clue.
They're not innocent. They're putting food on the table for a spamhaus. They should move, it's as simple as that. Web pages can be hosted anywhere on the globe.
It's hard to move millions of people, it's easy to change ISP. Very easy, there are tons of them out there. Could be done within a minute. Media3 is a spamhaus, it's one of the worst spamhäuse out there, and if I was peacefire, I'd think twice before giving my money to a spamhaus. Sorry, no sympathy here, peacefire should move, or get media3 to drop the spammers.
Perhaps I've missed something here.... Ogg Vorbis isn't GPLed is it? It's public domain? The software developed by the Ogg Vorbis project is LGPLed, so if you want to use the libraries, it's relevant, but the format itself if public domain, you can use it anyway you like.
If, indeed the chance is 1:250, then I think the DoD spending is justified.
You don't have to design pages specifically for any browser. You design a page that is accessible, and it works anywhere. It's the whole point of the web.
Opera is not spyware, and it'll never be. I know a few people there, and about all the techies there are members of Electronic Frontier Norway. Nobody would dream of adding spyware. You could take my word for it, or you could write some stuff to see what kind of information Opera sends out. They are very concerned about privacy.
If you don't want the ads, pay for it, and they'll go away.
AOL. I know a few people at Opera too, and nobody there would put in anything like spyware. About all the techies there are members of Electronic Frontier Norway, and some are pretty active too.
However, there is mounting evidence that the standard linear model is wrong, that small doses of radition isn't dangerous, and I would be surprised, very surprised if a reentry where the RTGs dissolved, which is the worst-case scenario, pretty much, caused any deaths at all.
Finally, you might want to read Carl Sagan's article about the launch of Galileo. It was the same issue back then, and as good as every point he made back then is valid for Cassini, and indeed similar future projects.
It's a very unfortunate fact that now that everybody is anti-nukes, you can say anything and get away with it. I hate that, it undermines the efforts of knowledgeable anti-nuke and anti-war advocates. Cassini was never an issue, none of the three concerns you list were valid, as is very apparent if you sit down and do the math yourself.
Very little, I'm afraid. There are many more very good instruments, most notably SOHO, TRACE.
However, for a amateur science project, it would be great, as you're working on data from a spacecraft that made history, and you're the only one who does it.
The question remains, how expensive it would be to build an antenna to downlink the signals.
It kind of makes you wonder how they looked, and how they thought when they were, say, 30 years old. I can imagine, if a person writes an autobiography when he's 80, he is going to have a different angle on his life when he was 20 than he does when he writes it at 30.
Even better, write the stuff down before you do the revolution. That's going to be something for the historians of the future. (Hm, I've copied everything I've got to tape the last couple of years, now it's time to do something revolutionary.... :-) )
Hm, no. For one thing, a document could, and often should, exist in many different content types, and servers should use content negotation to serve them.
More importantly, you impose a hierarchal structure on the web, but the web was invented to solve the many problems hierarchal systems represent.
Now, the DNS does represent a problem for the web, TimBL discuss this in his book, but you're going in the wrong direction, IMHO.
After reading the original articles, they claim a 3 arcminute alignment accuracy, and this claim is backed by scholars who I respect very much and who are not likely to exaggerate the accuracy of such things, I guess I will have to read the references given. I must say I have a really hard time understanding how they could measure the alignment to more than about half a degree or so, but perhaps somebody has thought of something smart I haven't considered. Oh well.
I remember using gopher more than WWW in the beginning of 1994. But I never really liked it. It's too hierarchal. Also, it's not necessarily free as in speech or beer, as the originators said that they might charge for it in the future. Perhaps they have changed their mind, and it was good they were honest about it, but I think that is an important reason why it couldn't take off.
IANAG, but I think this won't work. The most important thing is that viruses mutate and change so fast it'll probably strike back. Another concern is that humans are so alike genetically, it'll be very difficult to find something that hits only an ethnic group. That being said, selling a national genome seems like a Bad Idea [tm]. What they are hoping to get out of it, is probably more medical attention, but they are going to get quite a lot unwanted attention too, I suspect...
...this has been said long ago. In Sweden, government is pouring money into it, actually building (at least planning) a high-speed network in the country. Norway is just hoping that the marketplace will do it. I don't think they will come up with satisfactory solutions, and apparently the big firms building infrastructure will also lock people in, force them to use their portals, watch their banner ads, and so on. I would personally prefer Sweden's model, where it is more likely that small companies can compete with the large one, securing freedom of choice.
Oh, I did. The category had high quality for a period, and the cooperation between the three listed editors were good. But, when you spend most of your time educating editalls, who in spite of getting an lengthy e-mail with explanations and references to contemporary research continue to add sites that suck either after ignoring the e-mail or responding "who cares if the site suck, every submitted site has got a right to be in dmoz", or something to that effect, well it's time to take a hint and retire.
See? Exactly my point! I bet it looked okay to the editalls who did this too, but they weren't wise enough to stay away.... :-) Well, since you have been wise enough to stay away, you're not really the subject of my flames. When you grant someone power who has little knowledge to tie up those who have, there is not going to be peer review. Well, the answer to your question is no, I have elaborated this to death in the foras, and if you'd care to improve dmoz, you could search for my user id there.